The hyper-converged infrastructure market is maturing at a high speed with revenue from HCI growing at a blistering pace in 2018, highlighted by a sales increase of 78 percent year over year in the second quarter to $1.5 billion.

Hyper-converged infrastructure is reducing complexity in the data center and being leveraged to better support business-critical enterprise applications from companies including Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. HCI offerings are making substantial inroads into a broader set of use cases and deployment options. In 2018, HCI vendors including Nutanix, Dell EMC, Cisco, Pivot3 and Hewlett Packard Enterprise expanded their strategies to better embrace hybrid and multi-cloud and offer more compute-only, storage-only and software-defined networking options.

CRN breaks down 10 of the hottest hyper-converged offerings of the year.